Obituary

Pehr Henrik Nordgren

The Finnish composer Pehr Henrik Nordgren, who has died aged 64 of cancer said in 1976: "Music is not some independently 'made' artefact; and composing cannot be kept separate from life, from everything one sees and experiences and feels. I see composition as an outlet for the need to express myself more fully than in speech, a way of communicating with my fellow human beings."

Nordgren communicated in more than 140 works, including two operas, eight symphonies (1974-2007), a chamber symphony (1996), 11 string quartets (1967-2008; the last two premiered earlier this year) and a variety of chamber, choral and instrumental pieces. His reputation rests on his concertos and music for stringed instruments. Nearly half of his concertos feature string solos: six for cello, including the volatile Hate-Love (1987, for cello and strings), four for violin and three for viola; many also have string-orchestral accompaniment only, sometimes with percussion.

In addition, he wrote two concertos for the Finnish folk zither, the kantele (1985, 1999), a fine Concerto for Strings (1982) as well as an unnumbered Symphony for strings (1978), sonatas for unaccompanied violin (1999) and cello (1982), and the intense 30-minute Transe-Choral for 15 strings (1985).

Nordgren was born in Saltvik, in the Aland Islands off south-west Finland. He graduated from Helsinki University, in 1967, by which time he was studying composition privately with Joonas Kokkonen. That tuition concluded in 1969, by which time he had attracted attention with pieces including Euphonie I & II (1966-67; a third followed in 1975) and Epiphrase (1968).

His style reflected the radicalism of the times, and was based on the 12-note method, but including chord and tone clusters current in the music of György Ligeti and Erkki Salmenhaara. However, in Nordgren's First Violin Concerto (1969) and Concerto for Clarinet, Folk Instruments and Small Orchestra (1970), unfashionable folk elements began to appear, the accompaniment of the latter containing a trio of jouhikko (a bowed harp), kantele and accordion.

In 1974, he produced the first of two quartets and an Autumnal Concerto for traditional Japanese instruments, reflecting an interest in Japanese culture fired by a period of study in Tokyo (1970-73) that had profound effects on his life. While there, he met his future wife, Shinobu Suzuki; they married in 1973 and had one son.

On his return to Finland, Nordgren settled in the Ostrobothnian town of Kaustinen, a centre for the folk tradition. Although his work remained determinedly modernist in idiom, it gradually took on a more direct mode of expression that won over audiences. In this Nordgren was helped by the advocacy of the violinist-conductor Juha Kangas, for whose Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra he became something of a composer-in-residence, and the pianist Izumi Tateno, who commissioned and premiered much of Nordgren's piano output, including the often-played Hoichi the Earless, the first of 10 ballads based on Japanese horror stories.

Nordgren's first opera, The Black Monk (1981, after the Chekhov short story), was commissioned by the Royal Swedish Academy and premiered in Stockholm with a student cast in 1984, but had to wait 21 years for its Finnish premiere. Alex (1982-83), his second, was commissioned by the Finnish Broadcasting Company for television and first aired in 1986. The scenario reflects its composer's socio-political awareness, telling of an armaments manufacturer's son who falls in with a terrorist group.

Although Nordgren was not a political composer, his concerns for the wider world found direct expression in his music. The choral and orchestral Agnus Dei (1971) is sometimes referred to as the "Pollution Passion" because of its partly environmentalist text. The Sun, My Father (1987-89) set Sami-language poems and is, in Kimmo Korhonen's words, "an affirmation of solidarity with Lapland's dwindling ethnic minority; more generally, the work can be interpreted as a defence of all oppressed indigenous peoples". Yet, Nordgren was aware of how fortunate he was to live in a liberal democracy, unlike Shostakovich, a formative influence in his youth, in Soviet Russia next door.

Nordgren's output features a number of settings of Finnish texts, including from the national epic, the Kalevala, though in a style totally unlike that of his great compatriot, Sibelius. But like his predecessor's, Nordgren's career contained some curious paradoxes; he was an internationally acclaimed, progressive composer, based in a small regional town, renowned for folk music, which took to its heart the moody, intense and impassionedly serious output of the unprepossessing genius living quietly in its midst. He is survived by his wife and son.

• Pehr Henrik Nordgren, composer, born January 19 1944; died August 25 2008

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